Letters to the Editor
futhark
Published Letters: 245 Editor's Choice: 22
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Pretty Scary
[Read the article: Easy money days are here again?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But not as scary as this one:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/PeakGraph.jpg
If Americans (or any humans!) were totally rational beings they would live each day being thankful for, celebrating, and caring for an amazing planet that has sustained life for billions of years and could do so for hundreds of millions more, saving a little something over what they spent, designing manufactured items for their utility, aesthetic beauty, and durability, and recycling them when worn out. The culture of these people would oblige them to limit there numbers to a level that could be maintained for thousands of generations without adversely affecting the Earth's biosphere. Science has shown us deep time, deep space, and the amazing degree to which we are genetically and ecologically connected to all other people and to the rest of the living world. If we could incorporate these findings into the patterns of our lives, we would experience a transcendent sense of harmony and belonging and lose our need for status and dominion.
Instead we find ourselves in a culture in which everyone is struggling to climb to the top of a hierarchy of wealth and power, to exploit the resources of the Earth at the maximum rate, to draw down on the Earth's capacity to withstand damage until a tipping point is reached, when unimaginable catastrophes will occur.
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Don't Forget That ABC Is Owned By Disney
[Read the article: The worst, sleaziest press corps possible]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The company identified by most people as the most reliable provider of child-safe "family entertainment" is actually a close second to Faux News in spreading salacious stories and sponsoring duplicitous documentaries supporting the neocon version of reality. Think about it when you tune in to the Disney Channel or plan a visit to Disneyland. I gave up ABC and Disney two years ago. My recommendation is that people who appreciate genuine family values and truth instead of sugar-coated poison tune out Disney on TV and at the movies.
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The Second Worst Presidential Candidate In History
[Read the article: Bomb, bomb Iran?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ok, we already know who the worst one is and he managed to get selected twice. McCain's candidacy is focused on two issues: violently attacking those who we perceive to be unfriendly to us, especially the ones on the opposite side of the planet, and giving corporations an even bigger tax break than his tarnished predecessor managed.
Meanwhile, the country and the world will be facing the biggest crises in human history: the post peak-oil energy crisis, the climate change crisis, the fresh water availability crisis, and the national and personal debt crisis. None of these will be addressed by any part of McCain's program, which will only exacerbate all of them.
Electing or selecting McCain as our next president would be tantamount to the fulfillment of a kind of national death-wish. We need political leadership from people who paid attention in school to the issues of political and personal liberty and opportunity for advancement that are supposed to be our heritage from the American Revolution. We need a President and Congress that understands the nature of scientific research and does not dismiss its findings because they may be unpleasant or inconvenient. We need national leaders who can find peaceful resolution to problems, who will be able to hold dialogs with those who have taken a stand against us. I don't think that John McCain possesses any of these characteristics.
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Devolution - The Brilliant Non-Theory Alternative to Both Evolution and Creationism
[Read the article: Expel, expelling, expelled!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The scientific community apprehensively awaits the exposition of the Non-Theory of Devolution by its foremost proponent, rupert_c. By declaring the Big Bang explanation of the Universe's origin to be BUNK, he has become an instant hero among intellectual nihilists, rising to a level of greatness previously held by social scientist Henry Ford, who made exactly the same claim about history.
My grasp of devalutionary non-theory is admittedly weak, but I can see that it could just save us a lot of trouble thinking about ideas that just end up annoying other people. By ceasing to pursue understanding, the brain can give itself up totally to its hedonistic predilections and we can go all go through our lives with happy smiles on our faces and with pure hearts innocent of understanding causes and consequences. The main tenant of the non-theory of devolution seems to be that any small bit of nature that is not readily explicable by a given theory must necessarily be fatal to the theory. Since human knowledge is incomplete, as is human understanding, then all theoretical constructs will be flawed in some way and so the only real solution is to reject all explanations and stop wasting time coming up with new ones. Just accept the world as we experience it and get on with living. The question then is going to be, how will all the millions of scientists around the world make their living?
On a slightly different note and in mild defense of Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, rupert_c seems to be particularly annoyed by his perception that this theory is in some way progressive. I must assure mr. _c that Charles Darwin himself went to a great deal of trouble to insist that there was absolutely no scale of values in his theory and so is innocent of that charge. That mr. _c has this misconception is not surprising, given the great ignorance of the public about Darwin's Theory, remarkably simple and elegant though it is. Darwin insisted that natural selection acts on living beings moment-by-moment, allowing those with adaptive phenotypes to survive and reproduce more abundantly than others. The term primitive in biology means like the ancestral type, not inferior to advanced. For example, the human foot is plantigrade (heel in contact with the ground), like the most that of the earliest mammalian fossils, whereas the horse's foot is unguligrade (only the toe tip touches the ground), a more recent modification. No one with a true understanding of Darwin's Theory would assert that the primitive human foot is inferior to the advance horse's foot, but that both are adaptations to the role that each plays in nature.